Fabraft Design Lab: “Starry Wander” is an installation of digital design and production. The installation’s curves, height, and the distance between its lanterns are precisely predetermined by the computer. The Starry Wander installation symbolizes a land of hope(s). . . .

Jillian CRANDALL: For decades, the Olympic games have been used as leverage in cities to generate tourism and to fund infrastructural developments. In actuality, the event more often leaves a disproportionate amount of damage in its wake—environmentally, financially, and infrastructurally. The central problem of the Olympics is that while technology and culture continue to evolve, and while performative limits are transgressed each day, the fundamental nature of the event has remained stagnant.

remi MELANDER & helbert SUAREZ FERREIRA: CELL CLOUD is a formation of the random and organic geometry of the patterns of “marine clouds,” a structure shaped like honeycomb. Similar patterns are observed in flocks of birds, the growth of crystals, social networks and many ecosystems.

Using technologies of digital fabrication, two structures are created that seem to float, suspended as clouds. These are formed by inter connecting modules.

filipa VALENTE: Liminoid Bloom*s is an artificial interactive ecology that mediates the space between the gallery/exhibition and the environment of the city of Albuquerque. A responsive and performative ecology that alters the face of the gallery space and the way we interact and play with it.

A sensor located at the street facade of the gallery collects environmental data from the urban scape (sound, light variations, CO2 concentration). The environment sensor sends this information to the bloom*s located inside the gallery thus activating their breathing and movement behaviors.

Out of the deep contradictions of global capitalism an interconnected series of social, political, economic and ecological crises are emerging. . . . This lecture will situate a critical research practice within these emerging transdisciplinary configurations, and will argue for an architecture that, as a dialectically autonomous producer of values and concepts, can stage a distinct political engagement with these socio-ecological questions.

Blue (josé CADILHE, julia ALMEIDA, michail DESYLLAS, & salih TOPAL): This research is based on a conceptual approach toward synthetic ecologies—systems created to develop symbiotic relations with the environment. We view nature not as a given state or a pure and finished system, but as a complex organism that is continuously evolving and adapting to different conditions, which is contrary to the conservative and romantic notion that defines nature as a balanced order of self-reproduction in stasis.

dave EDWARDS: For Mircea Eliade “The distinction between the sacred and the profane is that of a boundary or threshold. a boundary between the ordinary mundane and confused versus the security and sense of being that comes only via accessibility to the sacred.”

The work centers on the notion of these two dialectic states, of the transition between the profane and the sacred. Initial studies began with a study into Dante’s Divine Comedy as a physical construction of the threshold between sacred spaces of Paradise and the Profane Inferno.